International round-up: Sunday Times up in ABC data

The Sunday Times has shown strong growth in the latest round of ABC circulation data for Britain, although all other titles have seen a decline in their figures.

For the month of March, The Sunday Times saw growth of 0.2 per cent year on year, while the worst performing newspaper The Independent saw national sales drop by 17 per cent.

Of the major daily newspapers, The Times performed best with a minor dip in circulation of 0.6 per cent year on year, while The Guardian was next best with a 2.8 per cent decline.

The positive figures for The Sunday Times come on the back of news that News International has cut more jobs from the newspaper, with redundancies handed out to staff at the paper’s Dublin office.

Time after a slice of Vice

Multinational media corporation Time Warner is reportedly in talks to purchase a stake in global media organisation Vice, with the deal valuing the company at upward of $US2 billion.

A report by Sky News said that the companies are conducting serious negotiations about a deal that would see Time Warner inject its cable operation’s news platform HLN into Vice, “in return for roughly half the enlarged company”.

Last year, Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox spent $US70 million to obtain a 5 per cent stake in Vice, an amount that was based on a $US1.4 billion valuation of the company.

Sky News’s report on the latest proposed deal sees Vice valued at $US2.4 billion, an indication that the company’s diverse and unique approach to news reporting is increasingly attractive to the major traditional media companies.

Protestors in Brazil have for more than a year been voicing their disapproval of the billions of dollars the government has spent of the event, despite more than a quarter of the country living in poverty.

As noted in a recent WAN-IFRA article, crime in the country is on the rise and a recent report from the Brazilian Association for Investigative Journalism said that in the last year there were 170 attacks of reporters covering protests.

While most of these attacks came from police, journalists were also attacked by protestors, with one local newspaper reporter, Bruno Paes Manso, telling WAN-IFRA that some protestors might intentionally target journalists who they believe are not giving an accurate account of the protests.